Ah yes, and meanwhile here on HN, everyone keeps repeating AI is not ‘replacing anyone yet’ and no one has to worry. While people are getting axed and replaced by AI everywhere I look.
This is just the beginning and we don't know what will happen. Some people will say creative destruction is happening and people will find other jobs. They may equate this to the horse drivers finding other jobs at the beginning of the XXth century.
The truth is we don't know. People that will lose their jobs may find other jobs or not. Maybe it's harder to reinvent oneself now. Maybe a lot of people will truly suffer because of AI.
I find very hard to know with certainty what will happen, who will remain unharmed, and who will struggle but make it through, but change is coming.
At least in the early 20th century there were a ton of jobs one could pivot to that weren't too difficult to train up for.
That isn't the case anymore. The only jobs that will remain will be skilled blue collar jobs and for how long is anyone's guess until we start getting robots with limbic dexterity and power systems to rival man.
We should prepare for it though. All the existential stuff with AIs killing humans I don’t think is the biggest danger. No work and no money is far more urgent. Even if it doesn’t happen, it can happen, so why not assume it will and change tactics when it’s clear it’s far more sunnier?
What I keep seeing is "This frees people up to do something else", which is the part that I just don't agree with. I just can't help but think there is a very large net drop in jobs in the areas that are going to be hit (apparently Game Art is on) and no increase anywhere else, so we're going to be left with a LOT of people with no where to go.
A single factory worker replaced dozens of blacksmiths.
A single mechanic replaced dozens of farriers and groomsmen.
We went from 80% people employed directly in agriculture to 1%. Only a very small portion of the 79% no longer working on farms are now building the giant tractors etc that make the few remaining farmers so much more efficient.
> What I keep seeing is "This frees people up to do something else", which is the part that I just don't agree with.
A lot of true believers in the infinite abundance of free market capitalism are going to have a rude awakening when they too are left to die in the trenches like dogs.
> With a 70% drop in illustrator jobs in China over the past year – initially triggered by economic slowdown and regulatory pressures, then accelerated by the proliferation of AI tools
I think we would need a firmer accounting of what percent of the decline is due to economic slowdown vs AI
You are right, but the more prominent members in this community believe there is no issue, at least as far as I have seen. Of course I do not read everything (I still have a job), but I do read quite a lot. I see more the seniors/established saying no worries and the juniors worry. But I also notice that the people who don’t worry are in a reality distortion field where they never work or did work with bad programmers for instance. They were smart, went to a good schools, have friends with 130+ iqs and think ai is far removed. If that is true or not (the ai being far from 130 human iq) is not relevant; it is better or at least good enough and definitely faster at many many things compared to most humans, but many people here never meet these ‘most humans’ because they have none around them.
> AI is not ‘replacing anyone yet’ and no one has to worry.
I have seen these comments and this excuse (among others) as well. The thing that amuses me, before that amusement turns to some sort of cosmic existential horror dread, is the lack of critical thinking and general reasoning skills on display.
The argument that AI is not replacing anyone yet is a strange one, because it implies that the outcome is inevitable (and at least unfortunate, presumably) but you shouldn't worry about it. You know, because it hasn't happened yet. But it will. So stop talking about it.
I don't know, I just find that strange. (and seeing this pattern all over the place increasingly frequently is deeply concerning but that's a real-talk so I better stop).
And this is the 8-bit version of AI Art, relatively speaking. In 10 years it will be hard to find a human that can match AI's quality in "regular art", i.e., something that doesn't try to innovate artistically but otherwise looks great.
Every disruptive technology creates and destroys jobs. This is business as usual since the start of the Industrial Revolution and beyond. No need to panic, like the Luddites, yet.
Real AGI is the time to panic, because that forms an event horizon we can't see beyond. There may well be no place at all for humans in a post AGI world.
But LLMs are still a long way from AGI. I don't expect to see AGI in my lifetime, despite the blistering pace of advancement.
Yep, you are a typical example. Your world (and mine) is safe, but let’s meet up and step into a fortune 1000 non FAANG office, hit someone up for a chat and let’s see if you don’t believe this person can be replaced now by gpt4. Try it.
I cannot see how, even after these stories, you cannot see how this is a problem and how this is not vastly different (horse drivers went to car drivers, farmers became factory workers etc; there is no such switch now) than the previous examples. We are limited by the amount of very clever people as the rest can be replaced (we need some robots but that’s coming).
When we reach AGI, then even the 130+ iq peeps like you and me can start the worrying. But that doesn’t mean there is a present danger.
No, seriously, the Luddites weren't angry because tech would put them out of business. They were angry because they hadn't gotten to buy looms for themselves yet. The Luddites were the prototype of a union, and smashing machines was a tactic used to get business owners to the table for labor negotiations. One that was responded to with propaganda and the force of law.
Let's consider two possible worlds:
- The one in which artists have a fancy new tool to play with to produce better art
- The one in which publishers fire all artists so they can use the tool for themselves
So far we appear to be hurtling down the second path. I can point to artists that are using art generators as tools to improve their work, but almost all of the hype and discourse surrounding generative AI has been "finally we can fire all the artists and just have the art make itself." I think this is a wrong-headed move long-term[0], but so long as business people believe artists to be replaceable, they will be replaced.
Furthermore, this has wealth-concentrating effects. Directly, this is a transfer of wealth from regular artists to the few that get to stick around to bang on the machine when it breaks. Indirectly, this is a transfer of wealth away from both artists and publishers to the companies who are making the AI art generators. In the past few years, AI research has gone from open scientific collaboration to extremely closed-off data siphoning operations. OpenAI in particular reorganized itself into a "capped profit corporation" after Elon Musk stopped writing checks, and started closing things off in the name of safety[1].
The time to panic is right now, even if AGI is decades or centuries off, so that precedents are established as to who owns and benefits from that technology. Let me explain by analogy: did Richard Stallman know and understand in the 1980s that proprietary software would lead to a handful of tech companies owning everything and renting it back out to you on subscription? No. But he did understand very well and very early on that proprietary software was an abusive relationship. Likewise, I can see that the relationship we are already moving into with AI is similarly abusive, even if we don't have AGI yet. A world in which AGI displaces humans entirely is a terribly unjust, illiberal world that does not deserve to exist. We either ride into the Singularity along with AGI, or we do not build AGI at all.
[0] While AI art is startlingly good at drawing novel images in response to prompts, fine control and consistency of those images requires manual intervention and fine-tuning. Effective prompt writing also requires an intricate knowledge of artistic history and terminology. Furthermore, there's a whole capability of art generators called inpainting that is criminally underused because you need to have basic art knowledge in order to use it effectively.
[1] To be clear, AI does have safety risks that are playing themselves out right now. The problem is that those risks have been used to justify turning everything into the worst kind of abusive SaaS.
And it cannot be coincidental that many companies, even the US, have announced layoffs right alongside their new investments in LLMs and AI. Sometimes within days of each other! We are literally seeing people laid off in anticipation of making money from AI, rather than continuing to pay the employees.
There's a race to the bottom in the video game industry to farm content to "best cost countries". Most man-hours aren't spent on engineering problems but on gameplay and asset generation.
The Chinese industry is even more brutal in terms of the race to the bottom. Purchasing power is much lower than in the west and there's barely any export opportunities, so the only way to make money is to crank out "good enough" games by having the same engine run with different assets.
> Most man-hours aren't spent on engineering problems but on gameplay and asset generation.
Which is a shame. I'd really like to see more done in procedural generation and reactive content. Just read about a mod for CyberPunk where killing certain characters can effect the stockmarket. It would be cool to see all the NPCs become agents. It also means that after say 40 hour already your game world would become unique and unlike any other.
Video game and movie illustrators are completely fucked which is sad. Very interested to see how this plays out in the comic/graphic novel space. I could theoretically see the big hitters getting behind human artists for the marketing points, but if some new or smaller comic book studio starts churning out AI content and it takes off they might be forced to follow suit. I think a lot of this might depend on how comic book stores themselves operate e.g if they also get behind the artists and refuse to stock AI generated works. But I don't know how many people are buying comic books from stores vs online, as a relatively outside observer it seems to be one of the only types of retail businesses that seem to have stood up pretty well against the online onslaught, probably because of how much they operate as a community hub.
Other prediction: Theoretically anyone with a semi-interesting TTRPG campaign could just feed in their weekly adventure into the program and have a comic book generated from the results. We could end up with a Soundcloud style situation but instead of songs there's 100,000 new comic books being generated a day. From there, it's not a stretch to say the same is going to happen to movies, because once you've got the comics (which are essentially storyboards) and the technology gets perfected for video, it's probably not a lot of effort to feed the comics into the AI and have it generate the movie.
Will be interesting to see how the quality vs quantity dynamic plays out. Either we'll start consuming more content from local creatives and indie studios or there will be so much dross to sift through we'll happily pay globo corps more money for the highest quality stuff. It'll probably be somewhere in the middle. At the minute, I'm about 8 episodes into Critical Role's 2nd Campaign and questioning why I even still have Netflix when I can access entertainment like this for free on Youtube.
I think all of this will probably be true. I also think that AI generated art is novel at the moment. Eventually it will get boring because it's essentially just retreads of what it already knows. Since it's now doing all the "creating," based on what it knows, really new and interesting creations it can create will become rarer and rarer. Companies will of course milk it as long as they can, but eventually, the world will hunger for something new that AI can't provide, because it hasn't been trained.
I give it 5-20 years before it becomes boring and predictable, like most corporate art already is.
The future is personalized content, not consuming from "thought leaders" or creatives.
It's not like comic sales in america were doing great either.
I know many people think art is some connection between the creator and viewer, but for the vast majority of people its really not.
It's a way to kill time or boredom.
There is a reason the same stories with slight twists are the only the ones that sell over and over.
You're correct on both counts. Independent and self-published artists will be more powerful, but the usual 'idea guy' hustle bro types are already abusing AI art generators to mass-manufacture nominally "unique" art to spam on various marketplaces. Artists that are trying to actually build one good, high-quality work have to compete with thousands of very well polished turds.
Consider creative/content jobs such as illustrators, freelance writers, translators as a spectrum or perhaps a pyramid.
A big part of that pyramid is mass produced "good enough" output that was already squeezed before AI. That part will be almost entirely replaced with generative AI operated by a relatively tiny group. And with "will" I mean right now. The top of the pyramid will be semi-safe but production methods will still drastically change.
I'm not convinced of the "we'll just create new jobs" narrative. From land to factory to office. What would be the next step in this cycle? I'm talking a billion people, not 3 super AI coders overseeing things.
But GPT's writing isn't that great. I would use it as a starter, because it can get you 60%-70% of the way there - but I wouldn't let it create the finished work.
I'm not as familiar with the typical illustrator's workflow, but wouldn't something be similar? Could you use GPT to quickly create some different kinds of ideas to see what you like and then use that as the starting point to finish off the work?
In both cases aren't there copyright concerns you'd have to address? How do you know GPT isn't using copyrighted material?
Concept artist is basically the idea generator. They quickly paint a bunch of loose ideas and present them to art director and rest of the team for discussion. None of their art makes in into final product. I could see concept art as being disrupted by generative models.
Which means you can reduce the time spent by that same amount. Or to flip it, one person can do the work of 3-4 people. You'd still want an editor, but you've always wanted an editor.
> How do you know GPT isn't using copyrighted material?
It quite obviously does use copyrighted material, but it's a dirty secret of these industries that so do their people. GPT and Dall-e will probably hide it better, but it's something the industry already has playbooks around.
AI will take every single job away until there's only a small sliver of "owners" who will eventually sell to fewer and fewer consumers.
Oh sorry yes downvote me. I forgot. I am on Hackernews, were we blindly run after all technological progress even if it's detrimental to real life society.
But..lets take AI and latest developments out of the picture for a second..
Imagine e.g. whole food providing world consists of only few coorps, run by few individuals that run a bot army to plant and harvest crops.. and they reap all the profits, while everyone else is unemployed: Isn't that a problem of the system? Shouldn't at least at that point everybody agree that pure free market capitalism needs to stop here and we should communize food creation?
And now for everything else: Why shouldn't we favor all technical progress and gets us rid of "stupid" jobs.. there is so much more from caring for others, doing science, doing (human) art.. yes everyone needs a purpose, but there is enough to be done (like imagine Star Trek utopia). The problem is just, this won't get paid well or not paid at all, while few people own the essentials forever and can reap profits..
We should reconsider our wealth and power systems.. in the end some Star Trek utopia where noone is forced tio do something he doesn't want to but can pursue his purpose should be great, or why not?
Readit News
Examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35326865
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35194986
The truth is we don't know. People that will lose their jobs may find other jobs or not. Maybe it's harder to reinvent oneself now. Maybe a lot of people will truly suffer because of AI.
I find very hard to know with certainty what will happen, who will remain unharmed, and who will struggle but make it through, but change is coming.
That isn't the case anymore. The only jobs that will remain will be skilled blue collar jobs and for how long is anyone's guess until we start getting robots with limbic dexterity and power systems to rival man.
A single factory worker replaced dozens of blacksmiths.
A single mechanic replaced dozens of farriers and groomsmen.
We went from 80% people employed directly in agriculture to 1%. Only a very small portion of the 79% no longer working on farms are now building the giant tractors etc that make the few remaining farmers so much more efficient.
A lot of true believers in the infinite abundance of free market capitalism are going to have a rude awakening when they too are left to die in the trenches like dogs.
But you might be right.
Tough so far I have mixed feelings, just today chatGPT had issues writing a simple 10 line bash or fish function.
I think we would need a firmer accounting of what percent of the decline is due to economic slowdown vs AI
Two random examples by searching algolia for a minute (entire posts, not just single comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008901
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33884202
I have seen these comments and this excuse (among others) as well. The thing that amuses me, before that amusement turns to some sort of cosmic existential horror dread, is the lack of critical thinking and general reasoning skills on display.
The argument that AI is not replacing anyone yet is a strange one, because it implies that the outcome is inevitable (and at least unfortunate, presumably) but you shouldn't worry about it. You know, because it hasn't happened yet. But it will. So stop talking about it.
I don't know, I just find that strange. (and seeing this pattern all over the place increasingly frequently is deeply concerning but that's a real-talk so I better stop).
They have no scruples about laying off a ton of their workforce.
Wait until non union entertainment industry jobs get a hold of this AI stuff.
It's over and it is coming.
Just like science still unable to get rid of flat earthers.
Deleted Comment
Real AGI is the time to panic, because that forms an event horizon we can't see beyond. There may well be no place at all for humans in a post AGI world.
But LLMs are still a long way from AGI. I don't expect to see AGI in my lifetime, despite the blistering pace of advancement.
I cannot see how, even after these stories, you cannot see how this is a problem and how this is not vastly different (horse drivers went to car drivers, farmers became factory workers etc; there is no such switch now) than the previous examples. We are limited by the amount of very clever people as the rest can be replaced (we need some robots but that’s coming).
When we reach AGI, then even the 130+ iq peeps like you and me can start the worrying. But that doesn’t mean there is a present danger.
NED LUDD DID NOTHING WRONG
No, seriously, the Luddites weren't angry because tech would put them out of business. They were angry because they hadn't gotten to buy looms for themselves yet. The Luddites were the prototype of a union, and smashing machines was a tactic used to get business owners to the table for labor negotiations. One that was responded to with propaganda and the force of law.
Let's consider two possible worlds:
- The one in which artists have a fancy new tool to play with to produce better art
- The one in which publishers fire all artists so they can use the tool for themselves
So far we appear to be hurtling down the second path. I can point to artists that are using art generators as tools to improve their work, but almost all of the hype and discourse surrounding generative AI has been "finally we can fire all the artists and just have the art make itself." I think this is a wrong-headed move long-term[0], but so long as business people believe artists to be replaceable, they will be replaced.
Furthermore, this has wealth-concentrating effects. Directly, this is a transfer of wealth from regular artists to the few that get to stick around to bang on the machine when it breaks. Indirectly, this is a transfer of wealth away from both artists and publishers to the companies who are making the AI art generators. In the past few years, AI research has gone from open scientific collaboration to extremely closed-off data siphoning operations. OpenAI in particular reorganized itself into a "capped profit corporation" after Elon Musk stopped writing checks, and started closing things off in the name of safety[1].
The time to panic is right now, even if AGI is decades or centuries off, so that precedents are established as to who owns and benefits from that technology. Let me explain by analogy: did Richard Stallman know and understand in the 1980s that proprietary software would lead to a handful of tech companies owning everything and renting it back out to you on subscription? No. But he did understand very well and very early on that proprietary software was an abusive relationship. Likewise, I can see that the relationship we are already moving into with AI is similarly abusive, even if we don't have AGI yet. A world in which AGI displaces humans entirely is a terribly unjust, illiberal world that does not deserve to exist. We either ride into the Singularity along with AGI, or we do not build AGI at all.
[0] While AI art is startlingly good at drawing novel images in response to prompts, fine control and consistency of those images requires manual intervention and fine-tuning. Effective prompt writing also requires an intricate knowledge of artistic history and terminology. Furthermore, there's a whole capability of art generators called inpainting that is criminally underused because you need to have basic art knowledge in order to use it effectively.
[1] To be clear, AI does have safety risks that are playing themselves out right now. The problem is that those risks have been used to justify turning everything into the worst kind of abusive SaaS.
There's a race to the bottom in the video game industry to farm content to "best cost countries". Most man-hours aren't spent on engineering problems but on gameplay and asset generation.
The Chinese industry is even more brutal in terms of the race to the bottom. Purchasing power is much lower than in the west and there's barely any export opportunities, so the only way to make money is to crank out "good enough" games by having the same engine run with different assets.
This reminds me of the countless dress up games I worked on during the Flash-era.
And you know what, a hand full of those dress up games made us more money then all our other games combined ...
Which is a shame. I'd really like to see more done in procedural generation and reactive content. Just read about a mod for CyberPunk where killing certain characters can effect the stockmarket. It would be cool to see all the NPCs become agents. It also means that after say 40 hour already your game world would become unique and unlike any other.
My husband and I coded it, and our kids had a blast creating the artwork in stable diffusion.
We then animated the avatars using another AI based on the vidoes of the faces our kids made. We created a whole game fairly easily.
Other prediction: Theoretically anyone with a semi-interesting TTRPG campaign could just feed in their weekly adventure into the program and have a comic book generated from the results. We could end up with a Soundcloud style situation but instead of songs there's 100,000 new comic books being generated a day. From there, it's not a stretch to say the same is going to happen to movies, because once you've got the comics (which are essentially storyboards) and the technology gets perfected for video, it's probably not a lot of effort to feed the comics into the AI and have it generate the movie.
Will be interesting to see how the quality vs quantity dynamic plays out. Either we'll start consuming more content from local creatives and indie studios or there will be so much dross to sift through we'll happily pay globo corps more money for the highest quality stuff. It'll probably be somewhere in the middle. At the minute, I'm about 8 episodes into Critical Role's 2nd Campaign and questioning why I even still have Netflix when I can access entertainment like this for free on Youtube.
I give it 5-20 years before it becomes boring and predictable, like most corporate art already is.
I know many people think art is some connection between the creator and viewer, but for the vast majority of people its really not. It's a way to kill time or boredom. There is a reason the same stories with slight twists are the only the ones that sell over and over.
It is not clear what happens when the fallbacks are more manual work that currently does not pay a lot.
A big part of that pyramid is mass produced "good enough" output that was already squeezed before AI. That part will be almost entirely replaced with generative AI operated by a relatively tiny group. And with "will" I mean right now. The top of the pyramid will be semi-safe but production methods will still drastically change.
I'm not convinced of the "we'll just create new jobs" narrative. From land to factory to office. What would be the next step in this cycle? I'm talking a billion people, not 3 super AI coders overseeing things.
Imagine being a script writer - taking other people's ideas and creating a script - in the face of GPT.
Imagine being a D&D campaign writer. Technical writer. Tier 1 support.
Any job that involves the previously tedious work of transforming ideas into writing or images.
I'm not as familiar with the typical illustrator's workflow, but wouldn't something be similar? Could you use GPT to quickly create some different kinds of ideas to see what you like and then use that as the starting point to finish off the work?
In both cases aren't there copyright concerns you'd have to address? How do you know GPT isn't using copyrighted material?
Which means you can reduce the time spent by that same amount. Or to flip it, one person can do the work of 3-4 people. You'd still want an editor, but you've always wanted an editor.
> How do you know GPT isn't using copyrighted material?
It quite obviously does use copyrighted material, but it's a dirty secret of these industries that so do their people. GPT and Dall-e will probably hide it better, but it's something the industry already has playbooks around.
AI will take every single job away until there's only a small sliver of "owners" who will eventually sell to fewer and fewer consumers.
Oh sorry yes downvote me. I forgot. I am on Hackernews, were we blindly run after all technological progress even if it's detrimental to real life society.
Imagine e.g. whole food providing world consists of only few coorps, run by few individuals that run a bot army to plant and harvest crops.. and they reap all the profits, while everyone else is unemployed: Isn't that a problem of the system? Shouldn't at least at that point everybody agree that pure free market capitalism needs to stop here and we should communize food creation?
And now for everything else: Why shouldn't we favor all technical progress and gets us rid of "stupid" jobs.. there is so much more from caring for others, doing science, doing (human) art.. yes everyone needs a purpose, but there is enough to be done (like imagine Star Trek utopia). The problem is just, this won't get paid well or not paid at all, while few people own the essentials forever and can reap profits..
We should reconsider our wealth and power systems.. in the end some Star Trek utopia where noone is forced tio do something he doesn't want to but can pursue his purpose should be great, or why not?
Society doesn't adapt quickly. There will be blood on the streets way more likely than a utopian society growing out of nowhere.